Tag Archives: religion

The Many-Hued, Messy Faith That is Christianity

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I was raised in an evangelical Christian church. I no longer identify as an evangelical. More on why that is some other time.

The thing is, when I was younger, I used to get annoyed by how TV and movies seemed to always depict Christians as Catholics.

Growing up, my church taught that Catholics were not good Christians. They spent too much time on ritual and ornamentation. There was too much memorization of formulaic prayers and not enough memorization of Bible verses. They took their orders from the Pope rather than directly from God (as interpreted by your local pastor, of course). Their faith was too impersonal.

So as a young evangelical Christian, I never identified with the Catholics portrayed onscreen. They may as well have been Muslims, as far as I was concerned.

These days, I don’t really care that “Christian” is equated with “Catholic.” I think it is just easier for the storytelling, so that the audience can readily identify the character as “Christian” and not Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist. Of course that assumes that the audience is not seeing “Catholic” as opposed to Methodist or Lutheran or Presbyterian or Greek Orthodox or Jehovah’s Witness or Quaker or Assemblies of God.

Because Christianity does come in many, many flavors. Over the centuries, Christians have diversified into an almost countless number of denominations, sects, cults, and systems of belief. There is no more one type of Christian than there is one style of ice cream.

This is true in spite of the fact that on a regular basis, someone attempts to speak for all Christians. The Pope is a good example. The office of the Pope is intended to be the recognized head of The One Church, Universal and Catholic. What about everyone else? Don’t know; don’t care.

Another example is the increasingly insistent whine of culturally conservative people who identify as some form of Christian. They say various untrue things like “Christians are being silenced” or “Christian voters are being demonized” or “Christians don’t believe in vaccines.” They incorrectly say that to be a “real” Christian you must vote for certain candidates and be in favor of certain cultural, racial, and economic policies (Fun Fact: Jesus said none of these things.) These spokesmen, these self-anointed prophets, tell you what to think, how to read your Bible, which interpretations are approved and which are not.

But that’s just not how Christianity, as laid out by Jesus himself, is. It is varied, diverse, open to many, caring and loving.

There is a saying that’s been around a while in faith circles:

In Essentials: Unity
In Non-essentials: Liberty
In all things: Charity

We could use a bit more of that right about now.

Perhaps Travel is Not the Key to Broader Horizons

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Growing up in California in the 70s and 80s, one of the refrains that I occasionally heard was that travel outside your home will expand your horizons. But does it?

We all have our cultural idiosyncrasies that are a result of where we grew up and who we grew up with. The challenge, then, is what do we do with that. As a young person, I was very much a product of California, a state so vast and independent–almost as if it were its own country–that one could live a full and varied life and never once leave the state. (Some people live a crabbed and limited life and never once leave the state, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Anyway, I have family in New York and traveled a bit in high school, so I was not as parochial as some. But I had a lot to learn, and still do.

Which brings me back to my original point: does travel open doors to greater understanding, as some travel writers suggest? (A recent article proclaims “To travel is to learn.”)

My gut reaction is yes, it does. It seems to me that once you see that there are different ways to achieve the same or similar results, you begin to understand that there is not (with some exceptions) one right way to do things.

And if there isn’t one right way to do things, that means that there are multiple ways of being that are just fine. With an open mind, one will see, at the very least, that one’s preferred (or accustomed) way of doing things may not be the best way.

Growing up, I was acquainted with a elderly couple, Frank and Helen Hitchin. The Hitchins were devout Christians and had spent time doing missionary work in other countries to evangelize the message of Jesus. Frank had spent time in the Belgian Congo and later, both went to Tunisia. There may be other countries that I am not aware of.

In my memory, the Hitchins were stodgy and dull, despite all of their worldly travels. This may be explained by the fact that they were old and I was young. But my grandparents were also old and did not seem nearly as stodgy and dull as the Hitchins.

Photo: Amitav Ghosh

I have a copy of a letter from the Hitchins that I recently obtained. My mother and I were sorting through some of her papers and we came across this letter, written to my parents in 1979 when the Hitchins were doing missionary work in Tunisia.

Most of the letter shows very little in the way of compassion for the Tunisians. Rather, it it strikes me as condescending and tone deaf. It belittles the Muslims for being impractical and bound by tradition. It asks us to be thankful that we are not camel herders and complains that there is no good sharp cheddar cheese to be had. It says with a regretful tone that all the newspapers in Tunis are in either French or Arabic, and the Hitchins cannot therefore read them.

It on the one hand says, disdainfully, that the Muslims can be “fiercely loyal” to their faith and on the other hand says that serving the Christian God is a “privilege” that is welcome despite hardship. It also seems reluctant to call Islam a religion.

And finally there’s this: “Frank just commented that sometimes he feels like [the apostle] Paul — in our rented apartment, a ‘prisoner’ of the Gospel….”

This makes me ask: why were they even there? Did Tunisia leave any impression on them, other than that they were glad to be Americans? How could their missionary work have been effective if they didn’t speak the language, and showed little interest in the Tunisian people’s lives?

So perhaps cross-cultural understanding is not automatic. As much as I’d like to think that stepping outside one’s American existence to learn something new will expand one’s horizons, maybe that’s an illusion.

Or at least debatable. Some argue that the saying that travel opens one’s mind is a false adage. “Travel does not automatically make you a better person,” says Travis Levius, a travel journalist and hospitality consultant. This appears to be true of Mr. and Mrs. Hitchens. I’m not saying that they weren’t good people, whatever that means in the long run. But their travel in the name of Jesus did not, evidently, make them more compassionate towards people of cultures that were different from their own.

True compassion transcends differences in culture, age, language, or religion. And compassion, I would argue, was one of the main teaching points of Jesus. But more on that some other time.

Epilogue: Mr. Hitchin claimed that he would not die before the Second Coming of Jesus. He died in 1996. Make of that what you will.

[Updated 3/17/22 with some corrected information on Frank Hitchin.]

Compassionate Inquiry on Wrongness

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What do you call someone who privately knows they may be wrong about something but publicly advocates in favor of it, sometimes with intense fervor, because to admit they are wrong would be against their interests?

A weasel? An asshole? A hypocrite? A lost soul?

A lot of political cataclysm comes from people doubling down on things because of an unwillingness to say, “Maybe I was wrong.” Those actions affect their lives but also the lives of all the people they come in contact with and cause a lot of damage for everyone else.

Actor Joel Edgerton, in the Washington Post

For a long time, people kept many of their opinions to themselves, for a variety of reasons. But today, people’s lives are so we’ll documented, and we have more ways of learning fact than ever before in history, that now we have many examples of this kind of clinging to wrongness.

For instance, there are those who cling to the belief that the Earth is flat. There are those who hold deeply conservative religious views and who show no interest newly revealed truths. We have people who believe there is evidence that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

Is this wise? If not, why does it happen with alarming frequency?

Based on casual observation, it appears that such persons take psychic refuge in what they are believing. Their belief system–political, religious, views of human nature–provides value to them, often in the form of a coherent narrative to their lives. Which is what belief systems have done for tens of thousands of years, so it’s human. But more often than not, such beliefs can conflict with new ways to understand the world. People willing to adapt will learn to adjust. Others, even in the face of evidence, dig in their heels.

At that point, the humane thing to do is quietly but firmly inform them of their wrongness, be strong and ignore their continued attempts to assert their opinions, and be compassionate. Some of these people can be redeemed but many are so caught up in their belief system, sometimes with intense fervor, that they are essentially lost.

Interestingly, Jesus said much about hypocrites while he was teaching 2000 years ago, none of it good. Somewhere along the line, many people stopped listening to that teaching and instead doubled down on their out-of-touch beliefs. But also, Jesus–and the Buddha, and Hindu scriptures–teach compassion for the lost.

Wise teaching indeed.